Philip Shenon’s 2013 book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, reconstructed the story of the assassination of President Kennedy with an unusual focus: not on the perennial question of conspiracy but rather on a narrower issue: the destruction of evidence that followed in the wake of JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963.

Students of the JFK story already know much of the dismal tale, and Shenon adds story-telling verve and amazing detail to the trail of destruction, some of it human.

The book opens with the unnerving untold story of Charles William Thomas, a State Department official in Mexico City. In the mid-1960s, Thomas picked up on information about Lee Harvey Oswald’s famous trip to the Mexican capital in October 1963, six weeks before the president was gunned down in Dallas. Thomas insisted his superiors re-investigate the story. They responded by destroying his career. Thomas went on to commit suicide. The government later admitted error and compensated the family without much explanation of what had actually happened.

You have to wonder: If Oswald was a lone maniac, why destroy the man’s career for calling for a second look? You don’t have to agree with Shenon’s position on the larger conspiracy question to be impressed by the detail he brings to this story.

Shenon’s latest piece in Politico revealed that David Slawson, a Warren Commission investigator — and defender — now says the commission was deceived by the CIA and FBI and that Oswald may have had accessories in Mexico City. Read more

“What if the answers to the many, persistent questions surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy lie not in Dallas or Washington, D.C., but in the streets of a foreign capital that most Americans have never associated with the president’s murder? Mexico City.”

So begins Phil Shenon’s new piece in Politico, What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico? Shenon is surely correct that the U.S. government’s response to Lee Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in October 1963 is key to understanding the JFK assassination story.

And before Washington and Havana can reach any real rapprochement, renewed allegations that the Cuban government aided JFK’s accused assassin demand clarification.

Which leaves us where we were before David Corn first called attention to O’Reilly’s tall tales. Media Matters still wants to take him down because he’s a bad influence on American public discourse. CNN still has sound journalistic and commercial reasons for questioning his credibility

But from the narrower point of JFK Facts, I’m satisfied with O’Reilly’s response. The much-abused Fox News host does not contest the facts first reported in JFK Facts two years ago. That’s decent of him.

George de Mohrenschildt was a fascinating character who would fit into a comic but world-weary spy novel by Graham Greene. And he was good friends with Lee Oswald, the man who supposedly killed President Kennedy. De Morhenschildt doubted that his friend was the author of Kennedy’s death. At the end of his life, he was not afraid to say so. Read more

HIs dubious story about being present at the suicide of George De Mohrenschildt, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, in March 1977, was exposed two years ago by JFK Facts. It remains the biggest remaining threat to his credibility, as Slate’s Justin Peters points out here,

In his best-selling book Killing Kennedy, Bill O’Reilly tells a brief tale of an intrepid reporter — himself — chasing the historical truth of JFK’s assassination in south Florida. But the story itself is a fiction, as O’Reilly reveals here in his own voice.

JFK reality check for Bill O’Reilly

In the annals of the JFK assassination story, rife with CIA and FBI malfeasance, O’Reilly’s fanciful anecdote might seem trivial. It is not the saddest feature of his book, which manages to ignore all of the high-quality JFK assassination scholarship of the last two decades.

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Our Mission

The assassination of President Kennedy endures as a decisive moment for the American people, when national security agencies consolidated their secret power and the American people lost faith in their government.

JFK Facts is dedicated to answering the questions, "What happened on November 22, 1963?" and "What is the meaning of the JFK story today?"

Our mission is historical truth. Our method is accountability. To secure both, we are committed to forcing disclosure of thousands of still-secret JFK records by October 2017. Want to know more? Click here.)

Quotable

William Attwood: ‘If the CIA did find out what we were doing…’ “If the CIA did find out what we were doing , this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people…..they might have been impelled to take violent action. Such as assassinating the President.” – former UN Ambassador William Attwood.